The International Color Consortium (ICC) desires a color calibration of a whole slide image (WSI) with a microscope for pathology applications. However, the ICC only targets a basic color appearance matching for calibration. Ultimately, a uniformly processed pathology slide image is desired. Currently, each hospital or each laboratory uses their own stain and protocol. As a result, the colors of pathology slides may have great variation, which may lead to diagnosis errors.
Conventional colorimetric calibration methods use reference color charts or “color palettes,” and these methods are based on appearance color matching. Other techniques may use a color filter array and an estimation of the spectral characteristics of the color image capturing device to accommodate changes in light sources.